The Country Set Read online

  THE COUNTRY SET

  Fiona Walker

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About The Country Set

  They say you should never go back. But this is exactly what ravishing Ronnie Ledwell is about to do, twenty-five years after she scandalised the Cotswold village of Compton Magna by abandoning husband and children for her lover.

  Here her father’s famous stud farm has seen better days. Faithful Lester, the gifted stallion man, has guarded Ronnie’s secrets for three decades, but can they both forgive and forget the past? Meanwhile, charismatic Kit Donne can’t stand the sight of the woman who so reminds him of his beloved late wife.

  Among predators greedily eyeing up the estate is sexy Bay Austen, a man who usually gets what he wants. Now he’s after pretty, married Petra Gunn and the stud farm land. Can Ronnie stand in his way?

  In a village riven with affairs, rivalries and scandals, Ronnie’s unexpected return, with all its glamour and mystique, sets in motion a drama from which there will be no turning back.

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About The Country Set

  Dramatis Personae

  Animals

  Map & Family Trees

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 2

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part 3

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part 4

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part 5

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Part 6

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  About Fiona Walker

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Dramatis Personae

  Captain Jocelyn Percy: The sixth generation of small, fierce Percys to run Compton Magna Stud. Stubbornly anti-social and bibulous since the death of his formidable wife Ann.

  Veronica ‘Ronnie Percy’ Ledwell: The Captain’s only child, a fast-riding blonde whose ill-fated marriage to handsome Johnny Ledwell ended with a swift exit in a lover’s sports car.

  Alice Petty: Her estranged daughter, a bossy Pony Club stalwart.

  Tim Ledwell: Ronnie’s son, a debonair wine merchant with a complicated love life in South Africa.

  Giselle: His French second wife, adding to the complication.

  Patricia ‘Pax’ Forsyth: Their younger sister, the family peacemaker whose marriage to tough scot Mack is a battlefield.

  Lester: The stud’s tight-lipped stallion man, dedicated to his horses, his routine and a quiet life.

  Blair Robertson: Craggy Australian three-day-event rider known as Mr Sit-Tight.

  Verity Verney: His wife, a reclusive Wiltshire landowner.

  Roo Verney: A defiant aristo anti-hunt protestor.

  Pauline ‘Pip’ Edwards: Baking addict and village busybody who runs a homecare service for the elderly.

  Kit Donne: Acclaimed theatre director and weekender, over-fond of leading ladies and scotch.

  Hermia Austen: His late wife, a talented actress born in the village.

  Orla Gomez: one-time Hollywood A-lister working her way back up the alphabet via Broadway.

  Ferdie and Donald: theatrical agent and his actor husband, both fine-dining RSC devotees.

  Petra Gunn: Historic novelist and neglected wife, founder of the village Saddle Bags whose gossipy hacks keep her sane.

  Charlie Gunn: Petra’s elusive barrister husband.

  William ‘Fitz’ Gunn: the Gunns’ oldest son, a quick-thinking centennial.

  Ed: his affably lazy younger brother.

  Prudie: their sister, a sparkly daddy’s girl.

  Bella: the pony-mad youngest Gunn.

  Barbara ‘Gunny’ Gunn: their grandmother, a Machiavellian merry widow and silver surfer.

  Kenneth: the Gunns’ veggie-growing neighbour.

  Gill Walcote: straight-talking member of the Saddle Bags who runs a local veterinary practice with Kiwi husband Paul Wish.

  Dixie: One of the Walcote-Wish’s three clever daughters.

  Mo Dawkins: the jolliest of the Saddle Bags, a tirelessly hardworking farmer’s daughter.

  Barry Dawkins: Mo’s rotund and rubicund tractor driver husband.

  Grace Dawkins: another pony mad eight-year-old.

  Sid and Joan Stokes and daughter Pam: Mo’s parents and sister, old-time village smallholders.

  Bridge Mazur: hipster Saddle Bag on a prolonged baby break, married to volatile Aleš.

  Bay Austen: dashing agricultural entrepreneur, hunt thruster and serial flirt.

  Monique Austen: his steely Dutch wife.

  Tilly: their daughter, pony-mad friend of Bella Gunn and Grace Dawkins.

  Sandy and Viv Austen: Bay’s parents, well-connected incumbents of Compton Manor Farm.

  Leonie the caterer: waspish whirler of canapes with very sharp elbows.

  Peter Sanson: Tax exile billionaire who owns huge tracts of Compton farmland.

  Carly Turner: animal-loving young mum, adjusting to village life and job juggling.

  Ash Turner: her ex-soldier husband whose family rule the Orchard Estate.

  Ellis, Sienna and baby Jackson, their three children.

  Janine Turner: Ash’s older sister, queen of cleaning and nail art empires.

  Jed Turner: their lurcher-loving cousin, a guileful thug.

  ‘Social’ Norm: the emphysemic Turner family patriarch, a settled Romany.

  Ink, Hardcase, Skully: Ash’s old school friends and drinking buddies.

  Flynn the farrier: another childhood friend, the Bon Jovi of the anvil.

  Mrs Hedges: one of Pip’s elderly clients.

  Brian and Chris Hicks: officious chairman of the Parish Council and his timid wife.

  Paranoid Landlord: the crooked proprietor and chef of The Jugged Hare.

  Animals

  Top Gun/Spirit: A wall-eyed colt with a big man attitude and a bright future.

  Cruisoe: The stud’s foundation stallion whose winning progeny inherit his lion heart.

  The stud’s broodmares: An opinionated bunch of matriarchs.

  Beck: Spoiled warmblood stallion, as stunning as he is screwed up.

  The Redhead: Petra’s rabble-rousing mare and her three pony sidekicks.

  Olive
and Enid: Ronnie’s sprightly little Lancashire Heelers, a squabbling mother and daughter.

  Stubbs: Lester’s unswervingly loyal fox terrier.

  Wilf: the Gunn’s wayward springer spaniel.

  Pricey: a bull lurcher bred for coursing.

  Map & Family Trees

  Part 1

  HIGH SUMMER, HAY-MAKING AND HACKING

  1

  ‘Go past it, you daft bat.’ Petra urged her horse on with her legs, but the mare had planted herself firmly on the verge, backed up against a Cotswold stone wall. She was rigid with indignation at the sight of a scarecrow in the garden on the opposite side of the lane, its lumpy body swathed in a psychedelic Boden kaftan, its head styled with a woolly hat and a Donald Trump party mask.

  ‘I donated that dress to the fête’s nearly-new stall!’ Petra recognised it. ‘I’d only worn it twice!’

  ‘Not really your colour,’ observed Gill, whose super-obedient dressage horse strode past in collected walk without a sideways glance.

  ‘Not his either!’ said Bridge, her young Irish pony dancing sideways and ramming Petra.

  The mare stood firm, chestnut ears shooting llama high as she spotted another scarecrow in the garden next door, this one crammed into an old pinstriped suit, its head a pink balloon in a multi-coloured Afro wig.

  Behind Petra, her two other hacking buddies were experiencing similar difficulties, hoofs clattering on tarmac, snorts rising.

  ‘You’ve got to admire the village committee,’ said Petra, calves nudging frantically. ‘It’s very bold to give this year’s scarecrow competition a non-binary transgender theme. Come on, Redhead.’

  ‘Gerronwithit!’ Further back still, Mo gave the familiar cry, issued to stubborn cobs, cows, sheep and children. ‘No offence, but he don’t like the look of that dress, Petra.’

  ‘It’s better on the scarecrow than it was on me.’

  The Saddle Bags, as they’d dubbed themselves, were out in the early morning, a regular midweek meeting. Gathered together by Petra, they were mothers, wives, villagers and horse-owners, sharing a close bond of sisterly secrets and a love of peering over their neighbours’ hedges. Together, they took to the lanes and bridle-paths around Compton Magna and Compton Bagot at least once a week to let off steam about husbands, hormones, horses and – very occasionally – horticulture.

  ‘Don’t you just love Open Gardens Week?’ Petra glanced over her shoulder.

  ‘Are the scarecrows always this disturbing?’ asked Bridge, spinning around on her baby-faced grey youngster. A Belfast-born, shoot-from-the-lip hipster chick, she was their most recent recruit, a maverick incomer with black-rimmed specs, a home-made woolly beanie over her helmet and a constellation of star tattoos gathered on her wrists and ankles (she called them ‘ermine marks’). Fearless and speed-loving, she’d only recently broken in her sharp little Connemara pony, who was, she liked to boast, a lot less paranoid than her volatile Polish husband.

  ‘Our straw man is very dapper.’ Tall, thin and gimlet-eyed, local vet Gill Walcote was in her early fifties but seemed to belong to a different era, when men tipped the brims of their hats. ‘We chose a golfing theme this year. We’ve nicknamed him Sergio Gar-seagrass.’ She was also a fan of extremely bad puns.

  ‘The goat always eats ours.’ Broad-berthed farmer’s daughter Mo Dawkins let out her trademark laugh. She joked that the only time she got to sit down was on her armchair of a piebald cob.

  ‘When I suggested to my lot that we make Worzel Gummidge, they all had to get their phones out to google him,’ Petra told them. ‘If he’s not the very embodiment of Jon Pertwee, I’m docking their screen time.’ She was constantly on the lookout for distractions from and inspiration for the racy historical romances she churned out in a shed in her garden, much of it coming from her opinionated chestnut mare, known simply as the Redhead, still stubbornly refusing to go past Donald Trump.

  ‘Open Gardens Week used to be a lot better,’ said Mo, whose lazy cob had ground to a halt in sympathy and the hope of a sly mouthful of hedge, ‘but the townies who’ve moved in now don’t take village events seriously.’

  The Comptons were idyllic outposts on the tip of the Cotswolds’ northernmost Fosse Hills, jewels in the crown of an area affectionately known as the ‘Bardswolds’ for its proximity to Stratford-upon-Avon. Although small, it boasted an abundance of steeply wooded river valleys skirted with orchards and dotted with golden villages into which families ripe for change dropped sweetly each year. The area’s grandest houses – stately Elizabethan and Jacobean piles hidden amid deer parks – had long attracted the super-rich in search of privacy a short helicopter flight from London and Birmingham, and actors settled in villages close to the RSC. In recent years, though, the Bardswolds’ manors and rectories had been traded between media types, like Top Trumps, while its cottages attracted theatre-junkie retirees and thirty-something professionals, all leading a procession out of London to find more bang for their buck. Of the Fosse Hill villages, the small and much-photographed Compton Magna was the star, regularly outshining nearby ‘ugly sister’ Bagot, despite the latter’s far longer history.

  Although it looked centuries old, Compton Magna had been largely created at the whim of a local family to house their estate workers. With its golden houses grouped in a figure of eight around the Green, its two-room school, the duck-pond and the tiny Gothic Revival church tucked between tall yew trunks and ancient meadows with standing stones, it was a stage set in which squires, small-holders and cottagers had played no part. Beloved of film and television crews, Compton Magna had appeared in everything from costume dramas to tampon adverts, pop videos and a grisly crime series.

  Heavily diluted by an influx of settlers aspiring to a gingham-bunting-Farrow-&-Ball English country life, the intense rivalry between the villages had lost its earthy edge. Open Gardens Week – dreaded by villagers and horse-riders alike – had become far more focused on the scarecrow competition and lavish cake-baking than on showing off one’s sweet peas.

  ‘It should be about the standard of the cornflowers, not corn men,’ lamented Gill.

  ‘We’re not all green-fingered,’ said Petra, knowing she was still classified as a ‘townie’ even after a decade living in the Cotswolds, more than half of it in this village. ‘And it gets seriously expensive when you’re shamed into spending a fortune at the garden centre at the last minute to make your beds look half decent.’

  ‘One can’t just click a ready-made herbaceous border on Amazon Prime, Petra,’ chided Gill, her glossy bay horse now strutting past a straw man in a scream mask brandishing a scythe. ‘I’m very proud of my achilleas this year, although last night’s storm finished off the delphies.’

  ‘Dad’s been having terrible trouble with his osteospermum,’ admitted Mo.

  ‘Has he tried holistic medicine?’ asked Bridge, whose little Connemara had now spotted the scream mask. Moments later, they shot off at speed across the Green.

  ‘I thought you and Charlie had a gardener?’ Mo asked Petra, as she gave her a lead past the offending scarecrows, the chestnut mare taking exaggerated antelope leaps.

  ‘We had to let him go.’ Petra hung on gamely as they pogoed from verge to verge. ‘Kenneth next door accused him of sabotaging his floral hedge and it all got very tawdry. A Forsythia Saga,’ she added, for Gill’s benefit, and was rewarded with an appreciative hoot.

  ‘Like gladioli, an absolute crime in a country garden,’ tutted the vet, glaring at the garish front beds of one of the holiday cottages that overlooked the Green, as they waited for Bridge to lap its chestnut-shaded expanse and rejoin them, her trendy grey hair extensions matching the pony’s white tail as both streamed behind them. ‘And those hanging baskets are offensive.’ She shuddered. ‘Nothing lets down a village like a desiccated begonia at eye-level.’

  ‘Don’t be such a snob!’ Petra had just bought several ready-planted, overpriced wildflower wicker ones from the farm shop to liven up Upper Bagot Farmhouse’s aus
tere façade. Husband Charlie had come home last weekend to find them dangling in welcome and asked sarcastically for three pints of best and a return to Ealing Broadway. That had just made her like them even more and she now thickened her Yorkshire accent to Last of the Summer Wine creaminess in their defence. ‘I bloody love mine.’

  ‘They add a nice splash of colour,’ agreed Mo, who had petunia-stuffed ivy-trailers outside her bungalow, as well as jolly pink fuchsias at the rundown DIY livery yard she ran at her parents’ farm in the hope they would attract wealthy clients.

  ‘What’s your opinion on hanging baskets, Bridge?’ Gill asked, as she came up alongside them again, the dappled grey rocking horse now blowing hard and still boggling at everything.

  Bridge’s eyes boggled too. ‘My opinion is that if you keep talking to me about fecking gardening I’m digging out my body protector and joining the Life Hackers.’ They were a rival riding posse, a bunch of daredevil pros and hunt members, none of whom idled along bridleways coffee-shopping about lobelias.

  ‘Trust me, they’re incredibly dull,’ insisted Petra, who had ridden out with them. ‘They might jump big ditches, but all they talk about is farming yields and racing form.’

  ‘Well, I think they’re ghastly,’ said Gill.

  ‘Not hunky Bay Austen and his merry men, surely?’ Mo chuckled, looking pointedly at Petra.

  ‘I was talking about hanging baskets,’ Gill said archly.

  ‘Petra’s admirer is pretty offensive too.’ Bridge scowled. ‘All that bloodthirsty old-school-tie privilege.’

  ‘He’s not my admirer,’ Petra grumbled, although she felt a frisson of delight at the mention of the handsome landowner. ‘Our daughters are summer-holiday BFFs.’

  ‘Does that make them BFFTSH?’ queried Gill.

  ‘Mo’s in the same boat,’ Petra went on. ‘Those three girls are the unholy trinity of the Pony Club under tens.’ Bella Gunn, Tilly Austen and their friend Grace Dawkins were currently so inseparable that their parents were forced to pass them around, like a spirits tantalus.

  ‘Bay doesn’t text me personally to invite Gracie for play dates, funnily enough,’ sighed Mo.